“As long as I can remember, I have always drawn pictures. I’ve always been very visual,” said Darlene Franklin Campbell. “I have always loved art and nature… I can’t remember a time I wasn’t that way.”
It would be easy to call Campbell an artist. Her art studio in Columbia presents quite a compelling argument for the label. But simply calling her an artist would be reductive.
A modern-day renaissance woman, Campbell is not only an artist but an author, a musician, a martial artist, a YouTuber, and a blogger with interests in history, genealogy, and science. During her early days, she experimented by capturing ill-fated bug specimens and dissecting dirt dauber nests.
Much like her childhood idol, George Washington Carver (who experimented with peanut and sweet potato products), Campbell grew up attempting to cross-pollinate different plants while painting and recording what each species looked like. The process sparked an early love of genetics, which she would later take with her into history and ancestry.
It may seem impossible seeing all the “pies” she has her hands in, as she describes it, and not wonder how she does it. The secret is, she sees everything as connected. Science, art, history, ancestry… they are not walled off from each other but pieces that fit neatly together.
“When I went to college, I wanted to double major in art and science, and they told me I can’t, that they don’t offer that, that they don’t go together… and I wanted to say they do go together, just ask Leonardo da Vinci!” she said. “I don’t see subjects as separate.”
Art is used to depict anatomy and different species; science ties into genealogy and heritable traits, which ties into history. And all of these subjects tell stories, like literature.
“The part of history I like is not memorizing a bunch of dates. The part of history I like is the stories about the people,” Campbell said. Given her view that no subject is an island, history is partially what attracted her to many other pursuits, like her writing. When she was younger, her dad used to regale her with stories about her great-grandfather who was, by all accounts, the first Mexican-American in the area. Her dad told her about all the bad guys he fought and how he went to the frontier to help Daniel Boone explore.
“By the time my great-grandpa was born, Daniel Boone had been dead a hundred years… my dad could pull a story out of thin air and make you believe every word of it was true. And even as I got older and knew logically it was impossible for it to be true, I still had to listen to his stories. He was such a good storyteller,” Campbell said, describing the history behind her own literary endeavors—endeavors that produced numerous titles, both fiction and non-fiction.
Some of her titles are humorous, others are more serious. All of them, though, are set in Appalachia. And no matter how funny the books may be, she takes how she presents Appalachia very seriously.
For instance, one art piece she is particularly proud of is a spin on the Celtic Lady of the Lake—the water spirit who, in some iterations of the legend, provides King Arthur with Excalibur. In Campbell’s painting, the lady wears blue jeans. She’s the “Lady of Green River Lake,” Campbell laughed.
Infusing grandiose legends with Appalachian culture lends the region a sense of legitimacy that it is often denied due to pop culture and stereotypes. The mythology that is already prevalent in Appalachian areas, like the stories Campbell’s dad told her about her great-grandfather, is a cornerstone of Appalachian culture and folklore.
And in connecting them to these romantic figures like King Arthur, Campbell both literally and figuratively paints an Eastern Kentucky every bit as beautiful as the renaissance art of Da Vinci’s time.
By Kenley Godby
kenley@adairvoice.com
